Gopher Sports

I would love to conduct an experiment to see how users view www.gophersports.com Every time I go on the website I get confused about where to find what I am looking for. The website is overly cluttered with 78 buttons on the home screen alone. I would like to conduct a usability experiment to see if others find the site difficult to navigate.

I would select students of the University, faculty/staff, as well as season ticket holders that do not fall into either of those categories. From each of those groups I would use volunteer sampling to gain participants. I would send an email out to students, faculty, and season ticket holders requesting they participate in the experiment and would also give them something such as a voucher for a free meal at a game to thank them for their time after participating.

In the experiment I would give them three tasks to complete. I would have them find the score of the latest football game, print a ticket for the upcoming game, and donate to the Golden Gopher Fund. I would have eye trackers on each of the monitors for the study so I could better track where participants are looking for each of the tasks. After each task is complete I would also ask them to rank from 1 to 7 with 1 being extremely easy and 7 being extremely hard how they felt about each task.

I think that this experiment would be beneficial in updating and cleaning up the website. There is so much information on there that needs to be on there, but needs to be on there in a different way. The way it is currently set up is confusing and cluttered making it difficult for users to complete tasks and find information. I believe an experiment would be an effective way to gain insight from a variety of users, it would also show how different users interact with the site.